By Dave Barton August 15, 2013

If all you know about the short life of painter Jean-Michel Basquiat is based on Julian Schnabel's excellent 1996 feature film, you'll have more info going in than you're going to have when you leave the touring show "Jean-Michel Basquiat: An Intimate Portrait," running through September at the Fullerton Museum Center. A New Yorker of Haitian descent, Basquiat was a pointedly political artist, deeply critical of a power structure that valued white heroes while ignoring those of color. His bright canvases were a mishmash of blocks of pigment, scrawled handwriting, cryptic symbols, uplift-the-race words and personal references—a stream of consciousness captured in oil. Andy Warhol was so enamored of his work that he took the young artist under his wing, treating him as though he were his son (according to the very good... More >>>